The Grand Inquisitor; 'Freedom' and Terrorism

"As a good number of commentators have noted in recent years, the opposition, now canonical in the public language of many governments, between the "freedom" of the North Atlantic cultural milieu and the nightmare of terrorism and fundamentalism that exists outside this enclave is more and more vacuous. Freedom as a designation for maximal consumer choice (including the consumerizing of public service and personal care) combined with an economic jeu sans frontieres is an indifferent rallying point for moral conviction, conviction about the goodness or justice rather than simply the comfort of a society. ... Faced with a global ideology of resentment, as wholly modern in its formation as is western secularism, an ideology equally determined to end history in its preferred way for the sake of an absolutely manifest social good, our rhetoric of defending freedom does not make a very persuasive showing.

One of the things that makes Ivan's Inquisitor such a perennially haunting figure is that his voice is clearly audible on both sides of the current global conflict. He is both the manager of a universal market in guaranteed security and comfort for a diminished human soul and the violent enforcer of a system beyond dialogue and change. And we may feel a similar unease at the way in which the profiles of terror are sketched in Devils: the selfless fanatic and the solipsistic libertarian are pushed together, at the mercy of anyone with the material and communicative resources to manipulate them. Repeatedly, he [Dostoevsky] insists to his readers that this is what a world without icons, without presence, will mean."
Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky; Language, Faith and Fiction

The Grand Inquisitor, a famous passage in Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, presents us with a conflict between heroic freedom and comfortable enslavement. You can read it here (Book 5, Chapter 5; p221 of the pdf)

The Grand Inquisitor throws into stark relief the incoherence of the modern notion of freedom post-Enlightenment. The Islamists know that the West's talk of freedom is empty, based as it is on a system of absolute abasement before the gods of the marketplace. We have chosen comfortable enslavement rather than freedom, or freedom to choose between many different products:

“The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
(Karamazov again)

The problem is that freedom in the west today is actually freedom-from, in which case it is a value that is founded on a negative, on a repudiation of something else, and thus, is at the outset a reactive rather than an active quality. The act of liberation that our ideals of freedom are founded on was actually itself a violent and reactive act. It was a tearing-away of state from religion in the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Rather than any more of my own poor rambling, I shall leave here some links to articles which expand on this last point.

This blog post by Artur Rosman on how The ‘Wars of Religion’ were actually ‘Wars of the Birth of the Nation-State.’

Over at Gornahoor, Cologero continues his defence of Tradition with his usual acuity: "One use of intelligence, or rational thought, is to determine how best to achieve a goal. This is instrumental intelligence. True intelligence, however, is to know what goals to aim for."

An Office for the Dead

An Office for the Dead

Leave me you workers of iniquity:
for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping.
The Lord has heard my supplication:
The Lord has received my prayer.

So let all my enemies be ashamed
and very much troubled.
Let them be turned back,
and be ashamed very speedily.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine on them.

First Reading
My dear people, since God has loved us so much, we too should love one another. No-one has ever seen God; but as long as we love one another God will live in us and his love will be complete in us. We can know that we are living in him and he is living in us because he lets us share his Spirit. We ourselves saw and we testify that the Father sent his Son as saviour of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him, and he in God. We ourselves have known and put our faith in God's love towards ourselves. God is love and anyone who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him. Love will come to its perfection in us when we can face the day of Judgement without fear; because even in this world we have become as he is. In love there can be no fear, but fear is driven out by perfect love: because to fear is to expect punishment, and anyone who is afraid is still imperfect in love.

V. Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord hear my voice.
R. Remember me O Lord, my life is but a breath.

Let us pray.
O Lord, whose nature it is to have mercy and spare, we humbly beg your mercy on the souls of the faithful departed, that through your mercy and our feeble prayers, they may attain to that glory which they have always desired. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

I Dreamed I Saw Robin Williams

Last night I dreamt that Robin Williams came back to tell me what the afterlife was like. He warned me that I would not escape God's wrath without prayer and good works. He said to pray vigilantly to become emptied of all desire and earthly vanity so that I might be filled with God's grace.

He showed me a place where souls were bound to the earth by the weight of their sin, some of them flattened by it, and the great fire of God's love was blowing on them, but instead of being caught up in ecstasy by it, it was a great torment to them, and they struggled to escape its heat. Robin Williams said that God's wrath was the flipside of his love, exclusively the result of a constant rejection of love both of God and neighbour in this life.

This worried me somewhat, and I awoke in distress, and I put my head against the window and looked out at the cold sad new year's day, and thought about all the worries of the coming years, and wondered what this year and all the years in my future would bring.

Dare To Step Forward

Sooner or later it becomes alarmingly clear: Yes, I am Israel. I am the ox that does not know its owner. And when, appalled, we get down from the pedestal of our pride, we find, as the Psalmist says, that our soul lifts itself up; it rises, and God's hidden presence penetrates ever deeper into our tangled lives. Advent is not a miracle out of the blue such as is offered by the preachers of revolution and the heralds of new ways of salvation. God acts in an entirely human way with us, leading us step by step and waiting for us. The days of Advent are like a quiet knocking at the door of our smothered souls, inviting us to undertake the risk of stepping forward toward God's mysterious presence, which alone can make us free.

From 'Seek That Which Is Above' by Joseph Ratzinger

Eternity

"The one remains; the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines; earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments."

On Fairy Stories

In this short dialogue between Aragorn and a rider of Rohan from Lord of the Rings is the essence of the argument Tolkien puts forward in his essay 'On Fairy Stories':

(Rider): 'Halflings! But they are only a little people in old songs and children's tales out of the North. Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?'

'A man may do both,' said Aragorn. For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!'

Gardening, Suffering and Evil

I look at my Mary Garden which I started back in early spring, and it is nothing like I intended it to be:

This is certainly the most challenging thing about gardening for me: not being able to control how it turns out. I mean, there is a massive element of being an amateur involved, which means I make simple mistakes like planting too close together and so on. But I think even the most expert of gardeners experiences this kind of dance between what they plan and what happens. After all, this is the essence of a garden - the harmony between nature and civilisation - the balance between the jungle and the city. In fact Valentin Tomberg puts it well:

“The dawn of humanity did not take place either in a desert where nothing happens, or even in a jungle where everything sprouts forth and grows without the regulating and directing control of the Spirit or, lastly, in the conditions of a city or town where nothing sprouts forth and grows but where everything is caused and is done through the regulation and direction of the Spirit. A “garden” is thus a state of the world where there is cooperation and equilibrium between Spirit and Nature, whilst a “desert” is a state of immobile passivity both of Nature and Spirit, a “jungle” is the state of activity of Nature alone, and a “town”, lastly, is that of activity of Spirit alone….one then understands that is not necessary either to do, or to leave alone; either to build systems of thought, or to let all thought pass through the head without control”

In a garden then, we have a metaphor for the Great Work which we must perform, of bringing our nature, unruly as it is, into harmony with the activity of the spirit - this is done through prayer and work. We do not want to eradicate our nature and let only spirit be present - this results in a kind of quietism, or false humility. Neither do we want to only allow our desires to flourish, forgetting about all else. This results in rottenness and vice. We want to say yes to God with our whole being, which raises our created nature, flawed as it is, into the light of Grace, where our soul is illumined with this light which overflows into our bodies, transforming them into bodies of light - this is the source of the doctrine of the resurrection, and it is why the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary was stated officially in 1950 (although it had been believed in tradition). Mary, being the first of God's creatures to say a wholehearted 'Yes!' to God, was then 'Full of Grace', and taken in body, soul and spirit with God.

It is not necessary, then, to do, or to leave alone. You must do both! Be attendant. In that top picture the leaves of the hollyhocks can be seen to be eaten away by slugs and snails. The bottom picture shows weeds growing rampant, and the lavender overgrown. Some dead growth has been cut away, and new plants have been allowed to spring up.

I think you could also say to be vigilant is important. To stay awake in the spirit, which needs work, or else the tares grow amongst the wheat; well that is really to mix metaphors, as we all know in the parable, the tares grew anyway. The real point is more subtle - the tares look very similar to the wheat, so it is only by being vigilant that we can tell them apart - evil often looks very much like the good thing to do - as it is usually more pleasurable in the short term and less hard work than virtue. And given that the parable tells us that the tares will be with the wheat in the fields till harvest time, then we know that the seeds of evil and suffering are growing in the fields of time and space, parasitic on the goodness of creation, we really have to keep awake, be attendant, be vigilant, but be at peace also, knowing God's saving work is being done, and carried out in the fullness of time, as Julian of Norwich says:

"And thus pain, it is something, as to my sight, for a time; for it purgeth, and maketh us to know ourselves and to ask mercy. For the Passion of our Lord is comfort to us against all this, and so is His blessed will. And for the tender love that our good Lord hath to all that shall be saved, He comforteth readily and sweetly, signifying thus: It is sooth that sin is cause of all this pain; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. These words were said full tenderly, showing no manner of blame to me nor to any that shall be saved. Then were it a great unkindness to blame or wonder on God for my sin, since He blameth not me for sin. And in these words I saw a marvellous high mystery hid in God, which mystery He shall openly make known to us in Heaven: in which knowing we shall verily see the cause why He suffered sin to come. In which sight we shall endlessly joy in our Lord God."

These reflections come after a difficult week in which my wife and I were told that our daughter who has cystic fibrosis, is culturing a bacteria called pseudomonas in her lungs, and is going to need hospital visits, nebulised antibiotics, and more. This just brought me up against the reality of evil and suffering going on invisibly amongst the joys of our life. In her lungs, something is trying to colonise them which will lead to damage if not caught, and it was going on without our awareness, which is so scary. It is very easy in this state to give in to the fear and anxiety which can surround you like a cloud and paralyse you, but you must, I will say it again, stay awake in the spirit, trusting in God, which brings the peace and clarity necessary for strength and kindness.

So if fear and suffering and pain come to you remember, be vigilant, be awake - pray, and work. And remember the words of J R R Tolkien:

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”